I’ve spent the odd few hours here and there mucking around on a site – just learning and applying things as I go. Turned out to be a good idea as I learnt Ruby On Rails, bootstrap, CSS and some jQuery. Was a good laugh but I’m going to call it now and move on.

I’ve managed to mangle the site into apache and it works! Its called WishLinks. Started as a real simple idea of letting people list and share present ideas for themselves. The premise was you could create your list in your own time linking to funky stuff you liked and then when your birthday rolls round or someone wants to buy you something (cause they are super nice) they can head to WishLinks and see what you want (or what you have been bought). Its like targeted presents!

I could have kept hacking away on it and learning but I want to move on to something new. Whats missing that I would have liked? Hrmmm – many things, some of which are;
– User notification engine – eg; when a user marks a link as ordered or bought
– Improvements to the UI – use of AJAX so the user never leaves the front page
– Logic improvements – my code is pretty bogus and could be optimized
– Inject referral code – thought it would be nifty to inject my code into any amazon links (is this bad form?).
– Rating engine – include some method of users marking a rating on each link for cost/want
– Logo – I don’t know. Get one? I need to play more with the gimp.

Its available on GitHub if you go for that sort of thing. I really got a lot out of building the site and it was great fun for my first time dabbling in building an interactive site.

Turns out the work proxy got an upgrade! Or someone ticked a few more boxes – lo and behold WordPress type blogs were caught in the crossfire. So that is the Q4 2012 excuse and I’m running with it.

Why not update from home? Lazy.
Why not write more of these self-evident questions and then answer them with a single word? Lazy.

End of 2012 was pretty cool – the Project Mame is still ongoing. More parts have been acquired and testing run. We are now into developing the 3D drawings for production, design has changed but end game remains the same.

I learnt some new things – hopefully one of which I can link to in the near future.

The country around us is either burning or flooding but that is old news now.

I’ve been powering through a great online technical book. The thing is complete with exercises, code snippets, implementation examples and questions. Its immense. I started hard and fast, powering through the first 5 chapters in 1 week – progress was easy and the concepts understandable. Things started to get complex and progress slowed – higher order thinking was required, re-reading of code became the norm. I forged on.

Somewhere around chapter 8 I seemed to develop an eye twitch. Initially, I thought it was a side effect of the work I was doing (heavy coding and excel usage) and staring at my (non-IPS) screen all day. It was odd though, the eye twitch only seemed to happen when I was reading this technical book. If I broke away to some other work or web browsing on the same monitor the twitch subsided.

I took a break from the book for a week or two. Work demanded more attention and I started reading a great book (Hyperion). The eye twitch dissipated.

Today, I thought I would re-visit the book and complete the later chapters. I find myself in chapter 11 of 12. I thought it was hilarious that 15 mins into reading the eye twitch returned. Its like a physical manifestation of the learning I’m trying to do by bashing my brain against the book.

I thought it was funny and wrote this. Thinking harder on it now, its not really that funny and likely I have a serious medical condition.

I am pretty surprised by the quality. Without opening any of the actual bubble wrapping the weight of the joystiqs is amazing. Smooth rotation as well! Its a simple 2 player kit – 2 joystiqs, 12 buttons, 2 ‘start’ buttons, 1 USB encoder and cables to match.

The next step in the plan is to assemble a test enclosure (using high-grade plastics!) and ensure Ubuntu can recognise our new babies. The testing will include vigorous games of ‘Toobin’ to ensure a full test cycle.

After that! We release our modelling and blueprints for the cabinet design!

I have grounding in a few languages (ruby, powershell, c++, perl), I’ve deployed a few CMS’ (wordpress, drupal), played with databases (MSSQL, MySQL) and feel comfortable with delivery methods (apache, IIS, nginx) but no experience in tying them together and deploying a site written by hand.

I want to learn and am seeking recommendations on where to start. Lets forget design and focus on code – for example, I’d like to start at a simple level, say deploy an HTML5 element that can draw an object (a square for example) that will tie into an application that can query a back end DB and then deploy that content.

I’ve run through most of “RailsForZombies” and enjoyed the learning system here (free, online and interactive) a while ago. Would this be sufficient to deploy my simple example as above? Accepting any and all recommendations/guidance!